A couple years ago there was a huge crisis since Microsoft was bringing an end to mainstream support for VB6.  At the time some people felt the sky was falling.  The reality of course is that applications still worked but the available support for unexpected behavior stopped.

Well it's that time again. The end of support for .NET 1.1 has been announced - October 14, 2008.  A little over 5 years after .NET 1.1 was released.  This isn't the end of support, just end of mainstream support.  Support will continue until 2013 - if you are like me your next question is what's the difference.  Microsoft provided the following table to explain:

What is the difference between Mainstream Support, Extended Support, and online self-help support?

Note A hotfix is a modification to the commercially available Microsoft product software code to address specific critical problems.

This might have other impacts, for example SharePoint 2.0 (2003) is built using .NET 1.1 for customization, so the impact of this on the SharePoint community and custom web parts could be significant.  Of course since SharePoint 2.0 mainstream support ends around 7/2008 (less then 6 months from now) that probably won't be a problem... at least on the .NET side - not sure about those actually using the product who haven't migrated to SharePoint 2007 (3.0) (Note: I was actually expecting the reverse (.NET 1.1 support ending first) when I started this post...)

At any rate I think it's safe to say that you shouldn't even consider starting a project on .NET 1.1 or SharePoint 2.0 (2003) at this point.  Of course in my opinion anyone not working on VIsual Studio 2008 is behind the power curve.